CES 2020: Corsair Announces The A500 CPU Cooler, Back to Air Cooling
by Gavin Bonshor on January 13, 2020 12:00 PM EST
Although Corsair's cooling division is more widely known for its extensive range of CLC CPU cooling solutions, Corsair has once again moved back into the air-cooled CPU cooler business. Corsair has once before tried to tackle the market with its older A50 and A70 models, the new A500 looks to target Noctua's NH-D15 with some very interesting features.
Moving back into the air cooling market after the launch of the Corsair A50 and A70 air CPU coolers, the new Corsair A500 looks to add a new dimension to its current cooling line-up. More known for its closed-loop liquid solutions, the A500 is a dual fan tower cooler with cooling capabilities stretching up to 250 W TDP. While the A500 doesn't support AMD's TR4 socket, it supports Intel's 2011 LGA20xx sockets, including AM4, AM3, FM2, and LGA115x.
In an interesting design twist to conventional tower coolers, the Corsair A500 uses a ratchet-style slide and lock fan retention system, which is designed to make users lives easier when installing. It is a full tower cooler with dimensions of 144 x 169 x 171 mm, with two of Corsair's ML120 cooling fans which can ramp up to 2400 rpm are included in the package. On the cooling plate, Corsair has pre-applied its XTM50 thermal paste out of the box for first-time applications.
When asked about why Corsair is going the air-cooling route after many successful AIO launches, it stated that the air cooling market is still huge with users, especially those who still don't trust liquid-cooled solutions due to rare issues such as leaks. Aiming for Noctua's NH-D15 CPU cooler which many in the industry see as the golden standard, Corsair states the performance is on par with the NH-D15, if not better in certain situations.
Corsair has priced the A500 at $99.99 and is available to pre-order directly on Corsair's store. The A500 is expected to hit retail channels later on in the week.
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kliend - Monday, January 13, 2020 - link
Seems like a big miss to not have TR4 support...Otherwise it looks relatively standard at this point
DanNeely - Monday, January 13, 2020 - link
Threadripper is too big to be cooled with standard coolers. The maximum size of the contact plate at the base is limited to avoid touching the socket instead of the heat spreader; doing that for mainstream sockets results in a base too small to fully cover the chiplets in threadripper (or Epyc, or Intel's giant server sockets). In the future they might create a second model with a larger base that can cool threadripper; but that model won't be able to cool chips in mainstream sockets.Drkrieger01 - Monday, January 13, 2020 - link
I have a hard time believing that this thing can match the NH-D15. It appears to have less heatpipes (can't really see in the pics?), and possibly less fin surface area. I'd be really interested to see some benchies on this model.I really do like that fan mount system though, kudo's for the design.
austinsguitar - Monday, January 13, 2020 - link
the height of the cooler will be an issue for most people. seems like many many cases wont support this thing.maus92 - Tuesday, January 14, 2020 - link
Hopefully the mount is tall enough to allow the fans to clear the memory heatsinks of other manufacturers. Also, it looks like the fans can produce some amount of airflow to help cool the RAM.DanNeely - Tuesday, January 14, 2020 - link
Just looking at the product pictures you're going to be limited to relatively short dimms. You appear to be able to make it work more or less by not sliding the fan down all the way (at a minor reduction in cooling capacity); but even the relatively short ones Corsair used for their images don't let the fans down all the way.yetanotherhuman - Wednesday, January 15, 2020 - link
"rare issues such as leaks"..Fact is, they all fail eventually, and then you can simply throw it away.
It's a waste of money, a waste of resources, a waste of effort...
On the other hand, swapping a dead fan out is trivial.
Retycint - Wednesday, January 15, 2020 - link
Purely anecdotal,. of course, but my 120mm AIO has been in use for 8 years (2012-2020) and still going strong, even with an average of 5 hours use every day. Not to mention it looks tons better than a big air cooler because it doesn't block out half the motherboard